Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “book”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Animal Man 30th Anniversary Edition (Book One), by Grant Morrison
- kudos:I feel like I’ve said this about a lot of recent comics, but while I appreciate what this contributed and what it’s trying to do, I just don’t like it all that much. I’m interested in its efforts at social justice moralizing and metafiction, and I understand there will be more of that in the second volume (which I’m looking forward to), but there was too much that felt like lazy comics in here (sexist costumes, silly crossovers and events, two-dimensional characters).
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac
- kudos:Like Zoë Schiffer’s Extremely Hardcore, I think this book will be even more valuable in the future than it is right now. I also wish I’d waited to read it for a bit instead of so soon after Schiffer’s book! What a wild, depressing story the Musk acquisition has been. I appreciate this book for giving more insight into the pre-Musk troubles of the company, but it still doesn’t shy away from how disastrous one billionaire’s ego has been.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Sex Criminals (The Complete Edition), by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky
- kudos:I am by nature pretty prudish, and even though I’ve been successfully dialing that down recently, I still feel weird about having read this and even weirder about acknowledging that on a public website. That said, I’ve always felt like I should give this a try since it’s well regarded in comics, and after a few failed attempts in earlier, more prudish years, I powered my way through this complete edition over the past few days.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin
- kudos:This book was repeatedly mentioned in Scott Branson’s Practical Anarchism, so I’ve wanted to read it for a while. It took me three tries, but I finally followed through and just finished the audiobook. It is a fascinating book for the way that it dares to imagine a way that society might be different than what we know now. Wikipedia says that the original subtitle was “An Ambiguous Utopia,” and that tracks with what I read, in that the book isn’t blindly naïve about the anarchist society that it lifts up.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Vigilant, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:Cory Doctorow taking on Proctorio by proxy is such a delight. This story on how dumb proctoring software is, how it could be beat technically, and how it needs to be beat politically ought to be required reading for everyone in ed tech. It also has compelling characters, enough food porn to remind you who the author is, some fun technical asides (learned a lot about WannaCry!), and is just fun.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for The Great War: American Front, by Harry Turtledove
- kudos:I’ve been feeling like reading some Turtledove recently, but I’m a lot more mixed on him than I’ve been in the past. I read nearly this entire series back in high school and thought it might be worth revisiting. The premise of this book (World War I in a timeline where the Confederacy successfully seceded) is super interesting. Woodrow Wilson as Confederate POTUS feels plausible, as do a lot of the other details, and it’s interesting to see how the story plays out.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Biggest Sting Operation Ever, by Joseph Cox
- kudos:This is the story of when the FBI ran an encrypted phone company marketed to criminals. Working with Australian Federal Police and European partners, they had a glimpse into gangsters’ and drug dealers’ conversations for years before they wrapped it up with a series of worldwide arrests. It’s a wild story that sounds like fiction but happens to be true. In fact, that’s Cory Doctorow’s blurb on the back—his recommendation on his blog is what got me to check this out.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Glass Houses, by Madeline Ashby
- kudos:I put this book on hold at the library after Cory Doctorow recommended it on his blog. It became available at the same time as two other Doctorow-recommended books that I’m now trying to rush through before other holds take them away from me. This is a book about the great excesses of tech bros and the many tiny excesses of the people using their tech in slightly off ways. It’s about misogyny, both subtle and severe, and (in the background) how scary climate change, American politics, and the Internet of Things are.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Public Domain (Volume 1), by Chip Zdarsky
- kudos:I’ve passed this up a couple of times at the library, but an article at BoingBoing got me to give it a try. It’s a fun, meta take on the comics industry through comics themselves, even if it feels melodramatic at times.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for We Should Improve Society Somewhat, by Matt Bors
- kudos:Bors has some great political cartoons in this collection, but I also don’t like political cartoons in large doses, even if that doesn’t necessarily reflect on him!
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for The Murderbot Diaries: All Systems Red, by Martha Wells
- kudos:I’ve read this at least twice before, but it’s a fast read and a delightful one. I know it’s my favorite of the series based on my fuzzy recollections of the sequels, but reading this one again makes me feel like I should give the sequels another shot.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter, by Zoë Schiffer
- kudos:I dedicated most of my early career to Twitter and probably owe my tenure to the ease of collecting Twitter data once upon a time. Were it not for some timely decisions to diversify what platforms I was looking at, the API cutoff documented in this book would have really messed me up. Because of how important Twitter was to me professionally, I followed a lot of this news as it was happening.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, by David Graeber
- kudos:It’s really hard to know how to rate this book! It is meandering to the point of tangential—Graeber confesses that it evolved out of an essay that didn’t stop growing, and I wonder if it would have been better if forced to be more concise. It also has some of the same issues that I saw in The Dawn of Everything (indeed, this could have been a section of that book), in that it’s working with data and history that are impossible to nail down for sure.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤 for After the Downfall, by Harry Turtledove
- kudos:This story has an interesting premise—a Nazi officer is plucked from a falling Berlin into a fantasy world where he learns a lesson about all peoples being people—but both fails to deliver and muddles its efforts. I like didactic fiction fine (it’s the reason I love Cory Doctorow so much), but the intended lesson of this story is clear from the beginning, and it’s never really obvious whether or why the main character undergoes any personal development.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Attack Surface, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:This is hands-down the best book in the Little Brother series and may even be my favorite Doctorow book? It’s hard to beat Walkaway, but this book is so perfectly written for our time (and such a perfect self-critique of earlier books in the series) that I’m not sure I’ll ever get tired of it.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back, by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow
- kudos:This is another one of those books that’s hard to review—in part because it wasn’t always easy to get through. I’ve owned it for a while and tried to get through the ebook a couple of times, but it wasn’t until checking out the audiobook before some long drives this weekend that I finally made it through. The book is wonky, and while that’s a good thing, I confess that I didn’t follow all the details in either the laying out of the problem or the articulation of the solutions.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy, by Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber
- kudos:I bought this book in the beginning of the year after coming into some gift card money for my local indie bookstore. Last summer, a mental health counselor on campus had recommended it as something I might look into; he hadn’t read the book himself, but it had come highly recommended from a colleague. I’m glad I picked up a copy, but I’m not sure it’s as good as I hoped it would be.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Homeland, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:Over a year ago, I listened to Little Brother, with the intent of revisiting this whole series. Homeland is my least favorite of the three, though, and so I stalled out pretty quickly and put it off until now. The book is better than I remembered it being, with some good themes and interesting plot developments. It does a good job of exploring WikiLeaks-style activism as something complex and not easily resolved, but it still comes down on the side of protest, activism, and pushback in a way that I find inspiring.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Youth Group, by Jordan Morris and Bowen McCurdy
- kudos:This is a goofy but fun book about demon hunters from a 1990s evangelical church. It came highly recommended by Cory Doctorow, which is why I checked it out from my local library even though I wasn’t sure it would be my thing. I enjoyed reading it, but I don’t think it was my thing after all. I followed enough of the 1990s gags and enjoyed enough of the story to have a good time.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for The House in the Cerulean Sea, by TJ Klune
- kudos:My spouse has been trying to get me to read this book for ages. I’ve never been resistant to the idea, but I just never got around to it! Finally, I made some time this week to try it, and I see why she was so keen on it. The sense of humor reminds me of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but whereas H2G2 is goofy to be goofy, this has a really cozy story and important message at the heart of it.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for The Masque of the Red Death, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:This is also a darker novella, and reading a post-apocalyptic story that touches on death and disease stresses me out. More than the last time I read it, though, I get what Doctorow is going for with this story. It’s a critique of survivalist go-it-on-your-own mentalities with optimism that even in the worst of times, humans can come together and help each other out—if they’re willing to try. I don’t like reading the story, but I appreciate the message.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Radicalized, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:This is much darker than the last two Doctorow novellas I read: It involves domestic terrorists taking their revenge on the insurance companies that screwed them over. I know I haven’t read this since first reading this collection in 2019, because it’s almost too dark for me. It’s better than I remembered it being, though, and while I am not in a hurry to reread it any time soon, I appreciate why Doctorow went dark on this one.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Model Minority, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:This is one of the most interesting riffs on Superman and Batman I’ve ever read (though, of course, their serial numbers are carefully filed off). It’s a fascinating exploration of race, prejudice, technology, and police excess. I can’t remember if I’ve read this any time except the first, but it’s one I need to read again and again.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Unauthorized Bread, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:This is one novella in Doctorow’s “Radicalized” collection, so I guess I could wait until I read all four and review them together, but I’d rather do four separate reviews. This story is so, so good. It’s an excellent anti-DRM screed and a compelling example of the social harms that can be done by technology to marginalized groups. Reading this back in 2019 is what got me (back) into Doctorow’s fiction, because it’s a perfect example of what he does best.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Astro City (MetroBook 4), by Kurt Busiek, Brent Anderson, and Alex Ross
- kudos:It’s not the best of Astro City (and it feels awkward when trying to work with race and gender), but it’s not the worst either. I enjoyed reading some stories I hadn’t read before, and some of them were really well done.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow
- kudos:I should start by acknowledging that this is a hard book for me to review honestly and thoroughly. First, it’s long and dense! I’m not sure I would have made it through if it hadn’t been via audiobook, and even then, I was sometimes listening at 3x speed to make it through before my loan expired. I know I missed some details along the way. Second, these authors are clearly making a big argument that takes on much of the received wisdom in fields like anthropology and archaeology.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for My Peer Group's Smoochy Chart Is Basically Now an Ouroboros (A Thirteenth Dumbing of Age Collection), by David Willis
- kudos:Well, I did it! This is my second readthrough of Dumbing of Age (up through Book 13 at least) in 2024. I enjoyed it, and I’m glad I’m done so I can read some other PDFs I’ve been waiting on. I like where this series is going (mostly), and I’m sure I have a lot to learn from it still.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Her Hugs Are Traps (A Twelfth Dumbing of Age Collection), by David Willis
- kudos:I think this collection has some of my favorite Joyce moments in them. The way Willis treats religion is something I really respect. Past me might not have loved it so much, but he gets a lot of things right about faith transition, including the way some people immediately take up new dogmas that are just as inflexible and judgmental as the ones they left behind. Can’t believe I’m almost caught up!
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for I Excised All My Anxieties into Cartoon Characters Who Definitely Don't Have Feelings for Each Other (An Eleventh Dumbing of Age Collection), by David Willis
- kudos:Comic continues to be good post timeskip! I am glad to almost be done with this reread, since I’d like to turn my attention to other books, but the reread is totally worth it for additional Willis insight and bonus strips.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Renounce Magical Thinking and Embrace Empirical Evidence (A Tenth Dumbing of Age Collection), by David Willis
- kudos:You know, I’d kind of been dreading getting to this book because I remembered the climax, and I remembered not liking it. After reading it, though, I’m starting to think that it’s better done than I remembered but just that it stresses me out. At any rate, this comic continues to be good, and I also feel like we’re getting more Carla, which I appreciate. She’s the best.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for In Real Life, by Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang
- kudos:Once you read enough Cory Doctorow, you start to pick up on the story elements that he reuses and recycles, and that’s pretty obvious here. Not only is this a graphic novel adaptation of a short story, but it’s very close to the premise of For the Win, too. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though! In fact, I really like this comic. The plot is interesting, and the art is AMAZING.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Now Let's Go Commit Something Mildly Subversive (A Ninth Dumbing of Age Collection), by David Willis
- kudos:This actually has an absurdly long(er) title that I refuse to include in its entirety. I appreciate the effort, but I think it might break something somewhere on my web workflow. It’s interesting to read this volume with knowledge of what’s coming up in the series! I can see plots being set up that I might not notice otherwise. Not all of those plots are my favorite, but I still really like this comic, so I’m looking forward to them anyway.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for The Gospel in Brief: The Life of Jesus, by Leo Tolstoy
- kudos:I don’t remember when I learned that Leo Tolstoy had written his own, Thomas Jefferson-style miracle-free New Testament mashup, but I do know I immediately wanted to read it. Then, I spotted a copy at my local indie bookstore while looking for things to spend a gift card on, and that’s how I picked up a copy. Like The Kingdom of God is Within You, I like some of Tolstoy’s ideas, but getting through them can be a drag.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Up Here We Can Be Garbage (An Eighth Dumbing of Age Collection), by David Willis
- kudos:In some ways, I can’t at all relate to Dumbing of Age because my college experience was so wildly different. Yet, it’s funny how I can relate so much to parts of it now, well after my college years. I don’t know that I would have wanted to have this freshman year (especially not the melodramatic bits or superhero fights), but I do wish I could have learned some of the lessons in the story earlier in life.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Boys Weekend, by Mattie Lubchansky
- kudos:There’s a certain flavor of bizarre that makes for great fiction, and this comic is that. It’s a story about gender transition and transphobia, a critique of tech bros and libertarian business types, and… a science fiction story featuring a Cthulhuesque cult? There’s a bit more gore than I normally tolerate in comics, and the art style isn’t what I’d identify as my go-to preference, but everything fits together in a surreal but profound way.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Just Put Down the Ukulele Only Then Can the Healing Begin (A Seventh Dumbing of Age Collection), by David Willis
- kudos:This continues to be good, the bonus material keeps getting better, and even though I can’t be bothered to write thorough reviews for these volumes (still 6 to go!), I’m really glad I own them.